In Flower District, Ground Is Sown For Housing

By DAVID W. DUNLAP

Published: December 10, 1995

WHEN the Adell family began assembling property around the Flower District for residential redevelopment, the current chairman of the City Planning Commission had not yet begun his career in government. Indeed, he was not yet out of fifth grade.

It has taken a long time -- a very long time -- for the Adells to acquire three large parcels on the Avenue of the Americas and win permission to build apartment towers there. They recently secured a rezoning of the avenue from 24th to 31st Street, changing it from a manufacturing district to a residential and commercial zone. And they were at last able to buy a key holdout parcel that had stymied their largest assemblage effort.

So now, after a quarter century, the Adells are ready to proceed with the project, a $250 million to $300 million undertaking: three buildings between 25th and 28th Streets, with a total of about 850 apartments and roughly 60,000 square feet of retail space. They informally call the project "Center Six," although someone once suggested to them that they call it "Flower Tower."

"It is not just housing but a new residential walk-to-work community in the middle of Manhattan," said Matthew G. Adell, president of the Adell Corporation and a partner in the development with his father, Leonard.

Joseph B. Rose, the chairman of the City Planning Commission, who was in grade school when the Adell project began, said: "These are obvious development sites and they obviously don't work for manufacturing. It makes sense to have housing there and we have every confidence that housing, with mixed uses, is going to get built there."

Groundwork on the project has gone on for decades, but the final push came in the last two years, when the Adells co-applied for the rezoning with the City Planning Department, of which Mr. Rose is director. As a practical matter, that meant that the Adells picked up the $675,000 cost of an environmental-impact statement that considered the effect of the districtwide rezoning.

The Adells would not discuss specifically how much it cost for them to acquire and carry the property over this fallow period, although Matthew Adell said it was "fairly low" when considered against the development potential of nearly 800,000 square feet.

Although the rezoning clearly benefits the Adells first and foremost, Mr. Rose said there was a compelling reason to initiate the change, given the potential for housing development along the seven-and-a-half-block stretch of the avenue. "We believe there will be a market response," he said.

The Flower District is not the only industrial quarter in which housing may be on the horizon. Part of TriBeCa -- from Chambers to North Moore Street, Church to West Street -- was rezoned recently to allow the construction of new apartment buildings. Other manufacturing districts in which rezoning has been passed are Hunters Point, Queens and Charleston, Staten Island. It is also being contemplated in Port Morris in the Bronx and, in Brooklyn, the neighborhoods of Red Hook, Greenpoint, Williamsburg and Vinegar Hill.

"We are not trying to displace manufacturing from areas where it's thriving," Mr. Rose said. "The goal here is to acknowledge and nurture mixed-use neighborhoods, which are one of the things that makes living in New York City so attractive. There are environments where a strict segregation of uses doesn't make sense and isn't what people want. But that has taken a long time to embrace."

"Jane Jacobs is finally appreciated in her former hometown," he added, referring to her book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," published in 1961, which argued for an "intricately mingled" diversity of uses.

Diversity certainly characterizes the Avenue of the Americas between 23d and 31st Street, from the Korean import and export concerns at the north end, through the flower dealers clustered around 28th Street, to the sewing-machine companies in the lower 20's and the parking lots that play host to the enormous Annex Antiques Fair and Flea Market every weekend.

The district first came to life in 1870 when Bryant's Opera House opened on 23d Street. It was soon renamed Koster & Bial's Concert Hall and expanded to 24th Street, where it included a beer garden and four-story building that has survived to this day. (Its ornate pediment still reads, "The Corner / Koster & Bial.")

Also in 1870, the Free and Accepted Masons of the State of New York laid the cornerstone for the Masonic Temple, a massive five-story granite structure on the northeast corner of 23d Street. The Masons remain on the property, in the 18-story Masonic Hall on 24th Street, completed in 1909, and a 19-story office building on 23d Street, completed in 1913.

AS the Masonic Temple opened in 1875, the six-story Racquet Court Club was under construction on the northeast corner of 26th Street, to designs by Alfred H. Thorp. The clubhouse, distinguished by its monumental arched windows and fine brickwork, had two courts, a gymnasium, a running track, weight and rowing machines, sparring and fencing rooms, billiard tables and a bowling alley.